The systems and tools of various embodiments of the present invention may include workstations, network devices, database systems, and methods to assist merchants creating a novel consensual advertising technique while optimizing their advertisement resources. The systems and tools benefit the web users by allowing them to be more discriminating in their search engine-based web search.
Merchants traditionally advertise their products or services online through websites. They sign up with search engine providers for a “space” in the latter's advertising networks. The merchant advertisers pay for their spaces in such adverting networks. Typically, the merchant advertisers pay the search engine providers, or the hosts of the advertising networks, a fee based on the number of clicks on a particular link to their respective websites. This online advertising model is frequently referred as the “Pay Per Click” or PPC method. In general, these paid advertising contents are referred to as “sponsored ads” or “sponsored domain” or “sponsored links” to information about the sponsor's services or products. This “sponsored” advertising model has become an increasingly important means in the commercial world nowadays for the merchant advertisers to reach potential consumers. Although relatively effective, this online marketing means comes with an increasingly high cost for the merchants to advertise online and produces only a limited return on investment (ROI).
When signing up with a search engine provider, a merchant advertiser typically provides a keyword list and bids for the highest possible listing position in the search engine provider's advertising network. The keywords must efficiently represent the advertised services or products to ensure a high click-through rate based upon matching with the search terms that are input by web users in search for information about such services or products.
In the PPC world, paid or sponsored ads constitute an invitation to web users to visit the advertiser's website that contains information about a particular service or product. A web user may accept the invitation by a single interaction with a web browser or a graphic user interface (GUI) device, i.e., a click on a link to the web data in the paid or sponsored domain. There is no consensual relationship between the advertiser and the web users, because the web users exist as a group only incidental to the contract between the advertiser and the search engine provider. The web users thus receive no benefit in monetary or other tangible value from the online advertising contract.
When a web user who seeks information about a product enters a keyword, phrase, or product model number into a search bar of the web browser or GUI device, a client system sends the request query to a server and fetches web pages that contain information about the product. Upon receiving such request query, the server collects, sorts, and sends to the client system relevant search results, which can be hyperlinks to web data in the natural as well as the paid/sponsored domains. As a common practice, a list of hyperlinks to the web data in the paid or advertiser-sponsored domain, for example, on the right-hand side of a browser window, while those natural or non-sponsored hyperlinks occupy the main, central-left section of the browser window. Psychologically, normal web users may stay away from the paid hyperlinks for fear of being bombarded by highly commercialized information. Although the paid or sponsored hyperlinks invite visits, the web users enjoy an absolute right to ignore their existence while devoting themselves to the natural search engine results. As a result, the click-through rate on the hyperlinks to web data in the paid/sponsored domain typically is much lower than that for those in the natural/non-sponsored domain.